“Jordan, walk to the edge of the pool and unzip the front pocket,” I said. I had the phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear, a bottle in my good hand and a twin in the crook of my cast, because that was how I did everything now. “There is a card in there that I wrote with my left hand. It took me forty minutes.” Behind him, I could hear the steel drums slowing down and people calling out, “Cannonball!” to nobody in particular. At midnight, I had opened his suitcase and taken out his swim trunks, his sunscreen and his sunglasses.
In their place, I had left him two tiny swim diapers with ducks on them, a rubber duck, a baby bottle and a stretchy elastic wrist splint, the same kind I wore. Taped to the splint was my card. It said, Day one, left hand only. Feed, burp, change and rock two babies. Report to the nursery at six a.m. Do not wear your trunks. You will not need them. “Kay,” Jordan whispered, “I am standing in front of my brothers holding a swim diaper.” “Good,” I said. “Hold it like you mean it.”
He did not argue. That was the first thing that told me something had changed. I heard him walk, and then I heard a door shut, and the steel drums vanished. “I thought you were just tired,” he said. His voice was thick. “I thought it was the hormones. I did not know about the wrist. I did not know you could not lift them.” “I told you,” I said gently. “I told you twice, and I cried in front of you, which I had never done. You heard a woman complaining. I was asking for my husband.” For a while, neither of us spoke. Then he said, “I am coming home.”
A swim diaper pulled from a suitcase gave one husband the weekend to bring his wife back to the nursery in Tulsa.
The ship would not turn around, of course. Jordan got off in Cozumel, bought a ticket on the first flight out, and sat at the airport gate for six hours with a swim diaper in his pocket. His brothers called him a coward, and then, one by one, they stopped. His older brother, Marcus, texted me at midnight. It said, Kayla, I have two kids. I should have said something to him months ago. I am sorry. I read it twice. Then I put the phone down on the nightstand, and with Mrs. Hutchins on the couch holding the baby monitor, I slept for five straight hours.
When Jordan walked in the door, he was sunburned on one arm only, from the airplane window, and he looked like a man who had aged ten years in a day. He set his suitcase down in the hall and went straight to the nursery without being asked. I gave him my terms at the kitchen table. He would take every night feeding until my cast came off. He would move back to our bed. The five thousand two hundred dollars would be repaid to the house savings from his overtime. And every Wednesday, he would take the twins to church early and sit with them in the nursery, so I could sit in the sanctuary alone.
Mrs. Hutchins, my neighbor of eleven years, came across the lawn on Thursday with a pot of chicken and dumplings and a look that could curdle milk. She is eighty one. She set the pot down, folded her arms, and looked at my husband for a very long time. “Jordan,” she said, “I raised four boys, and not one of them ever walked out on a newborn.” Jordan opened his mouth. “Do not interrupt me,” she said. “I will be here every morning at seven until that cast comes off. You will be here every night. We will both pretend this never happened, but I will remember.”
His brother Marcus drove up from Dallas in July with his wife and their two small girls. After supper, he took me aside on the porch. “Kayla, I laughed at him on that ship,” he said. “I laughed because I was ashamed of myself. My wife did everything alone with our first, and I told her it would get easier.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I called her mother the next morning and apologized. I wanted you to know that your note did not only reach Jordan.” I squeezed his hand, and I told him that was the best news I had heard all year.
The money consequences came right away. The cruise line refunded nothing. Jordan sold the fishing boat that he had kept for his brothers and the big television in the living room. He picked up weekend routes at the trucking company, which meant long hours, but he drove home every Sunday night to bathe the twins before bed. When my cast finally came off in the spring, he held my wrist in both of his hands as if it were made of glass. “I am never going to stop being grateful,” he said. “I want you to hold me to that.”
My grandmother Opal passed four years ago, and she raised six children on a Cherokee County farm with one working hand after an accident took the use of the other. She was the strongest person I have known. In her name, I started the Opal Fund. It pays for a month of home help for new mothers in Tulsa County who are injured, ill or recovering from surgery and have no family close by. In the first season, we helped fifteen women. One of them wrote to me, in a shaky left hand, a single line: “Thank you for the extra pair of arms.”
On the first warm day of summer, Jordan loaded the twins into a double stroller and walked them to the neighborhood pool, a small city pool with a blue slide and a snack bar. I followed behind with a towel. When we reached the gate, he stopped and looked at me. “I think this is the part where I should go in with them,” he said. Ava was in a yellow swim diaper with ducks on it, and Eli wore the same in green. Jordan, in his trunks, walked down the steps into the shallow end with a twin on each arm. I sat on the edge with my feet in the water, and I laughed until my eyes ran.
